The Case Against Spanking: How to Discipline Your Child Without Hitting

by Irwin A. Hyman, Valerie Hyman

This book offers parents and teachers constructive methods of discipline, useful for everyday situations. It documents the long-term negative effects of spanking?how it brutalizes kids and creates violent adults. Irwin Hyman, an expert in the field of home and school discipline, explains in a passionate and compelling style why spanking or hitting children is abusive, destructive, and counterproductive. He then gives common sense advice on alternative forms of discipline, which help to raise happy and emotionally stable children.

250 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 1997

Reviews

[Taylor Grayson · Rating 5 out of 5]

My expectations for the book plummeted when it started with a painfully embarrassing imagining of a discussion between characters from the awful 1980's sitcom “Mork & Mindy”. Probably a bad idea to embed material in your book whose shelf-life is guaranteed to be short.

Thankfully, there was no further cheesiness and in the remainder of the book, the author succinctly showed why violence against your own children is a bad idea and provided many examples of alternative ways to correct their behavior. I particularly enjoyed the small case studies and would have appreciated a lot more, because they show how to apply the theory to real-world circumstances.

For any prospective parent, this book is a good start; it mostly just gives you a taste of what's possible and a few basic principles about how to get there. The conscientious parent should probably buy a few more books that provide a greater variety of non-violent child rearing practices in order to better spark the imagination.

I note that one reviewer on Amazon gave the book a one-star rating and complained that it wasn't “Christian”. Sadly, Christian child-rearing practices have come to be associated with rigid, highly punitive, physically abusive approaches to discipline, presumably in accordance with the proverb “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” This, of course, comes from the Old Testament, and no sane human being would ever use that as a reliable guide to moral behavior. I will point out that Deuteronomy 21:18-21 suggests that a rebellious child should be put to death and even most fundamentalists would be shocked at that solution. My view is that any good, decent human being should be receptive to information that can allow them to be kinder human beings while still fulfilling their responsibilities.